


Angel

by bittergrapes



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Murder, Serial Killer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 20:17:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5511674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittergrapes/pseuds/bittergrapes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John as an ‘Angel of Death’ or serial killer doctor. Crosspost from my Tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Angel

_“The physician who killed me,  
Neither bled, purged or pilled me,  
Nor counted my pulse but it comes to the same,  
In the height of my fever I thought of his name …”_  
– Nicarchus

The ones who get caught are the ignorant ones. They kill too many in too short a time frame, artificially raising the death rates of their department or floor. They use a drug not in the patient’s regime or one that creates effects counter to the patient’s typical symptoms. They make the mistake of appearing too interested, too invested in the outcomes of too many patients. Worse they make a scene at the time of death, or insist on being present, or insist on accompanying the body to the morgue. Worse still they talk about their part in the murder.

Hospitals are loath to let go of a valuable employee. They are chronically understaffed, clinging to even the dullest syringe jockeys they can find in hopes that it will be enough to keep up their ratings. Bad press could damage their bottom line or even get them shut down, and it’s not as if there isn’t stiff competition, all NIH departments vying for the same patients. The private clinics are even worse, he’s heard. Rich old folks who want to squeeze every last drop of mortality they can, and are willing to pay the price: that’s pound signs in the eyes of greedy upper management. And they’re not going to let one little death or two little poisonings get in the way of money.

Still, he takes no risks. One death a month, only a patient that has been under his care for a reasonable amount of time, and only using methods that won’t show up as suspicious in an autopsy or exhumation. He prefers the patients who have persnickety regimes in the first place; his favorites are ones already on Pavulon, where one milligram more is enough to drive them over the edge, open up their pupils to that vast endless plain of eternity. He enjoys the view, seeing them grasp for him feebly, their mouths smoothing into voiceless screams as their muscles slacken, their heart grows numb, and finally they exhale, a tiny whisper into the sterile air.

The ancient Romans used to catch the breath of their dying loved ones with a kiss. He’s always been tempted to try it, to see if he can feel the final restraints of energy, the last throes of life. One day, he promises himself. One day he’ll press his lips to a cooling victim and suck in their essence. For now he compensates by taking their pulse as they go, feeling the surge of blood before it begins its long sluice toward the extremities, pooling along the bottom of the body as gravity commands.

He is not what one would expect of a serial killer. Short, blue-eyed, with sandy blonde hair and soft velvet wrinkles along his face that tells of long sleepless nights and deep anxiety. He has a rather high voice for a man with a plain, Midlands accent: working-class roots. He smiles often and shouts rarely. His bedside manner has always been rated as excellent, and he gets along well with coworkers. He does not demonstrate any of the warning signs that nurses and doctors are trained to look for. No morbidity. No gallows humor. He does not predict when patients will die. He does not ask to be present at post-mortems or appear to enjoy telling families that their loved one is gone. He has no ominous nicknames or habits. Patients consistently label him as kind, attentive, and appropriately concerned for their care.

Some have said that Dr. John Watson loves his charges to death.

Only Dr. John Watson understands the irony.

It started as a child growing up in Lambeth, a dirty, impoverished sore on the hide of Britain. His grandmother was dying slowly, criminally slowly, of alcoholism, her bony body bent briny with the effects of her disease. His parents – drunkards themselves – suggested the family throw a mattress party for her using the pad she’d slept on, a holy rat-torn parody of real bedding. Sometime during his parents left, leaving him to finish the job. He remembers the feel of her weak body writhing beneath him, her muffled cries, the heavenly popping noises as her bones curved inward and snapped. He remembers the wet sound of the final push and then the silence, the sweet soft silence of a job well done.

He received an erotic erection for the first time in his life.

Soon he was torturing animals quietly and kindly in their basement. Rats, mostly. Sometimes a squirrel. He’d slit their bodies apart with a scalpel he’d found rummaging in the nearby hospital’s trash. The feeling of their still-warm guts, their still-moving bodies as he cut into them, nearly made him feverish with joy. They would gnash and scream and bite him and then slowly, beautifully slowly, blink out, their pupils expanding into a hideous black well, their thrashing petering into soft twitches and, finally, stillness.

Sometimes he’d draw it out for days on end just to watch them suffer. If they died while he was asleep or at school, he would cry, upset at having missed the climactic moment.

No one ever asked why he spent hours downstairs in the cold, unfurnished basement, or why he would emerge with blood on his hands and face.

And, years later, no one asked why he ran to the bathroom during a dissection in science lab, assuming it was to throw up. In reality the arousal was so intense he could barely contain himself. He asked the teacher later to let him redo the experiment. She left halfway through for her lunch break, and he finished himself off just in time for her to return and commend him on his hard work. He managed to suppress his smirk.

He was popular in primary school and beyond, with plenty of friends both among staff and students. His medical school professors consistently rated him among their favorites for his eagerness to learn about the human body and willingness to practice dissections as often as possible. Many noted that he would come in during office hours to discuss advanced techniques in surgeries, as well as rare pharmacological reactions. If some thought he was a bit too interested, a bit too intense, they kept it to themselves: after all, medicine takes a rare talent, and if morbidity and obsession often intertwine with that talent, it is certainly preferable to cowardice and squeamishness. Brave doctors take calculated risks.

Only John knows how calculated his risks are.

His lust for murder made the most of his time in Afghanistan. Dying in combat is expected, even with the best of doctors, and John milked this for every drop of blood he could get. He would stay late, work long shifts, get lauded for his attention to detail and perseverance. He would hold dying men in his hands, watch them shudder and grow cold, and be rewarded, time and time again, for his service.

Sometimes, when no one was watching in the thick of combat, he would pretend to take a wounded soldier’s pulse by pressing hard on the carotid artery, his fingers nearly disappearing into the fold of the man’s flesh, and watch him struggle and gasp for air, his face turning blue, all struggle leaving him. Then John would scream for backup and heroically attempt to resuscitate his victim, demanding cc’s of blood and a heart massage, all for naught. No one suspected him, no one asked questions. He was the god of death and deserts, and none stood in his way.

The shoulder wound that ended his service was inflicted as he crouched over a dying technician amid fiery bursts of artillery flare, slowly inserting his mess kit fork into the man’s artery and watching his life pour onto the creamy sand. When the other servicemen found him, the other man was dead, apparently of a shot to the neck.

No one asked why Dr. John Watson’s fork was covered in his fellow soldier’s blood. He received a Victoria Cross and an honorable discharge.

Sometimes at night he pleasures himself to the memory of listening to that bucktoothed, gangly technician plead for his life amid the cacophony of battle.

The monotony and boredom of civilian life is tempered only by his carefully planned murders. He checks the charts of his department each day, waiting for signs of imminent demise. Waiting for someone who will not be missed.

A man in his early thirties arrives with a severe head wound and brain swelling after a fall from a four-story building – St. Barts, his alma mater – and he knows this is his next target.

The patient is on succinylcholine to suppress severe tremors he has been experiencing as a result of the brain damage. He is conscious but unmoving. John can feel the man’s attention as he walks into the room. He almost swears he sees his eyes moving, but knows it’s just his paranoia. His heart races in his chest. The small vial of medicine feels cold in his hand, as if filled with liquid nitrogen.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. I’m your physician, Dr. Watson. I’m here to give you your medicine.”

He unwraps the plastic syringe; a rush of blood shoots to his member. He can feel the erection rising, but it doesn’t matter; it’s not as if his patient, completely immobilized, could tell a soul. In a moment he won’t be able to tell anyone a thing, ever again. John allows himself a small smile.

The serum rises easily in the needle and he inspects it carefully for air bubbles. Not as if it’ll matter, with the amount he’s giving to the man: four times the therapeutic dose, twice the lethal limit.

He is about to slide the needle into the vein when the patient suddenly speaks. He is so startled the needle falls to the floor.

“It looks as if your luck has run out, Dr. Watson.” A cold, mechanical sneer rises to the patient’s face. It would be so easy to press his pillow to the man’s face, to smother him to sleep …

In a burst of anger John grabs the syringe from the floor and lunges for the man, but Sherlock dodges it easily, grabbing the doctor’s wrist and turning the needle back onto him, pressed against his heart. They both freeze for a moment, the very air hanging still, before the metal pierces the skin and the plunger depresses, blood fouling the syrup as it courses into John’s chest.

Before long he falls to the floor, his muscles unwilling to hold him. He can feel his lungs seizing up, refusing to take air; his heart falters, beating slow, agonizingly slow, as his pupils envelop the edges of infinity.

Sherlock leans down, his smiling face blurring into focus as John struggles to survive.

“The ones that get caught are the ignorant ones, you know. They kill too many in too short of a time frame, artificially raising the death rates of their department or floor …”


End file.
